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ORAL HISTORY OF PAUL ELZA
Interviewed by Sibyl Nestor
November 1973
Interviewer: This is an interview with Mr. Paul Elza, made in November 1973. Mr. Elza is Assistant Director of Oak Ridge Associated Universities.
Mr. Elza: When I moved to the Oak Ridge area we lived actually in Knox County a few miles away, although subsequently after the family first came to this region on my mother’s side along about the time of the Revolutionary War, some of the family did move to Clinton and we have relatives in Clinton. On my father’s side we’re Swiss German stock. On my mother’s side we’re Scotch Irish and Welsh. The Welsh side of the family had come from coal mining people and that I presume, attracted them to this part of the country. My father and grandfather on my father’s side were woodwork craftsman from Switzerland and there was, in the Northwest part of Knoxville, an area that referred to as a Swiss Colony in some time in the mid to late 1840’s. The Swiss began coming to this part of the country and my father’s folks joined them there. So, I never until Oak Ridge started, actually lived in the Oak Ridge area, although we visited in Clinton and area known as Wheat, which is approximately where the Gaseous Diffusion Plant now is. I can recall when I was in high school playing football down about where the entrance to K-25 is, there was a football field there. And, on the way to the football games, the team would stop at a large spring and this spring had a few benches and tables around it. In those days a trip from Knoxville to Wheat was considered quite a trip, especially for a group of kids, high school age. So we’d set out for the football game about 10:30 or 11:00. We would stop at the large spring on the highway from Clinton to Wheat and that spring is still flowing and it flows out where the Oak Ridge Municipal Swimming Pool is. That was a sort of a center and a stopping area where people traveling would simply pack a lunch and stop there. So the football team would do that and then go on to the game.
The whole area where Oak Ridge is now located, best of my recollection, had a rather minor highway running through it and connected about where Robertsville Road now is, with the highway that ran North and South. The other highway ran East and West in Clinton on down toward Kingston. Where the highway in Clinton passed under the railroad, the L & N Railroad, there was a little station there that had been built at the time when the railroad was built. My grandfather’s brother was a construction engineer on the L & N Railroad, and as you may be aware, there are, I believe, two or three tunnels between Knoxville and Dosset or Marlow. On the L& N Railroad, according to him, the railroad was a long time moving and passing through this particular area. The necessity for building tunnels made it a long range construction job. Of course that particular uncle had long since died by the time Oak Ridge came into being, and anyone else in the family other than a sister of my father who was still living at the time Oak Ridge was founded. This little railroad station was named Elza, which happens to be the family name. And it in fact showed on some of the maps, and I understand in some listings of post office directories, that this little spot was known as Elza, Tennessee. I went to this man, who incidentally died too a year later, being the age I was then I had no great interest, I had too many other things to occupy my attention, so I never followed up on this as thoroughly and carefully as I should, and of course upon her death I presumed, just about all knowledge of the matter died with her, but she told me this story. Her uncle, my great-uncle, being a construction engineer and being located at that point because there was a highway in the short distance east there, they were building a bridge across the Clinch River, as well as the tunnels and then they had to build the overpass over the highway from Clinton. It meant then that that became a construction center for quite a long while, and trains coming out would have loads of supplies and materials and construction equipment and so forth on them and to know where to drop those materials off, and to know to whom they were assigned. The little shack that they put up there, they painted on it, the name ELZA. And when the train would see that, then they would know, well okay, this is where this part of the material and so forth was thrown off. And being near a highway, then you could move it relatively easily elsewhere. It then, in that spot, became known as Elza Station, and subsequently some mapmakers picked it up and called it Elza, Tennessee.
When the Manhattan Corp of Engineers came here, and they named this Clinton Engineer Works, the railroad and the river made a rather natural boundary. In knowing that they were going to have to maintain the rigorous security they then made that the boundary in the fence, around the place. Because the highway was there, and there was a tiny little railroad station there, they then constructed an entrance way to the Oak Ridge area. That entrance way became known as Elza Gate to Oak Ridge. And I suppose for a good long while, it probably was the most used and the most common gate, because what is now the Solway Road to Knoxville, was a winding crooked little road called Solway, but the highway that exists now was not built then. As a result there wasn’t a great deal of traffic coming into Oak Ridge in that direction. Most traffic went to Clinton and then came across through Elza Gate. In 1949, I suppose it was, best I can remember, when they decided they would open the gates. The ceremony to symbolize the lessening of security in the area was then held at Elza Gate and movie films and all that sort of thing were done. Now that is the family connection, and I am native to this part of the country, as of course there are or were, my two sisters and four brothers. They’re all gone now except one sister, and she lives in California. But none of the family had any direct or immediate connection with Oak Ridge except myself. I had been for some years with the Tennessee Valley Authority. The TVA was one of the major things of great importance that happened to this region in my lifetime. And it commenced the year I graduated from high school, and of course those were Great Depression years. And the opportunities for going on to college were quite limited unless an individual were able to work and earn some of the expense. I had gone to work with TVA and it was a delightful, exciting, romantic adventure that was going on. It’s hard for anyone looking back on it roughly 40 years later to realize what a momentous event that it was to this part of the county, and being a bright-eyed-bushy-tailed high school boy, I wanted to go where the excitement was. As events passed during World War II, it became highly important that the United States produce enormous numbers of airplanes. I can recall a headline that came out one day, and I don’t recall what year, but probably about 1940, when President Roosevelt said that the United States would build 50,000 airplanes a year. Now in those days, airplanes were built in the dozens or the hundreds, and this was a wild-eyed goal. In order to do it, they needed tons and tons of aluminum. With the aluminum company at Alcoa being nearby, TVA then undertook to build on a rush-and-crash basis, a number of hydroelectric dams. Norris Dam was already built and in place. They decided to build Cherokee and Douglas Dams. A man by the name of L. G. Warren was assigned as Chief Construction Engineer on Cherokee Dam. He was an extraordinary human being. Now he had been with TVA for some good little while, and as I recall it, 11months from the day they broke ground for Cherokee Dam, they had electric power flowing from that dam to the aluminum company.
Interviewer: Incredible.
Mr. Elza continues: It is indeed incredible and it established all kinds of records and of course it made L. G. Warren something of a hero to all of us youngsters around. I had been attending the University of Tennessee and the Law School, and inside TVA I had an opportunity in their contracts and material divisions to become a supply man for L. G. Warren, which I thought was an extraordinarily exciting assignment. During the course of Cherokee then they decided to build Douglas Dam which isn’t too many miles away but on another river, the French Broad, that is close to the Holston. Lee Warren asked then that I continue in that assignment on Douglas. Douglas Dam was nearing completion in late 1942 and Lee Warren left TVA, I think, on extended leave of absence, to undertake some sort of major construction job, I believe in Mexico. Well, in very late ’42, there were rumblings throughout the country-side about something big going on out near Clinton. But most of the people of my generation, with whom I associated, they were quite busily engaged in many other things, and paid relatively little attention to it. Although, word and rumor began to spread that it was going to be a great artillery range or a bombing practice location, and that caused some concern in the population. Then, rumors would spread and did spread and people would talk at social gatherings, about the secrecy in the place, because all kinds of things went in and nothing ever came out. There was great speculation as to what was going on. Well, it was natural for one of those things about which we all speculated was that it would be some great new secret weapon, and of course that wasn’t too far from the mark. Even among the university community there was also speculation that, is it possible that they had learned how to split the atom. Yes, and could it be that this is in some way connected with that. Some of the people in physics and chemistry knew of the work that had gone on, they’d heard of it at least ????… Neils Bohr and I can recall, this is before I had any association with Oak Ridge, being at the University one evening, and gone to an evening class, and a group of us had gotten together to drink coffee and talk, and some man among us, I don’t remember who, said “If we aren’t working on it, we should be because I am confident the Germans will be.” It was only 2 years later that I recalled that and realized the process of reasoning that he had gone though to come to that conclusion, because it was obvious and logical, and for a person working in the field of physics, he was well aware of some things that were going on outside the country whether he knew some of the things that were going on inside the country, I don’t know. But I recall at the time thinking well, certainly if the Germans were to do any such thing, we would be at their mercy, as would the rest of the world. So, I simply stowed it away in the back of my mind and said, well I hope we’re doing something and thought no more of it, because I was still with the highly exciting adventuresome TVA, and thoroughly happy and content and felt that my career was going on from there assuming that the military and the war didn’t interfere too much. They did interfere somewhat because I was asked to take flight training and did, and flew for a while, but then when I got to advanced training I washed out. At that time, when I had three children, then having washed out of advanced training in the Air Force, I presumed that they were through with me, and so I felt, well I’ll do my bit here with TVA, which was of extreme importance to the need for power and industry associated with the war. Well, I believe it was in February of ’43, I looked up from my desk in TVA and there appeared in the door Lee Warren. He was a brusque sort of rough- talking character and I heard him call out, “Where in the hell’s Elza?” And so I stood up at my desk and held up my hand to wave to him and he came back. He was a rather powerfully built fellow but not very tall, and had a rather glowering presence about him, but a man of great confidence and gentleness and once you got over being afraid of this exterior, which I long since had because I worked with him and was delighted to see him of course. He came back and loomed over my desk and says, “I want you to go with me.” Well I probably would have gone wherever he said at the drop of a hat and I says. Alright when? And he says, Now. I told him, of course, that wasn’t possible, and I’d like to know a little something about it. And he says, I can’t tell you anything about it, and he says, but it isn’t far away, and he says, I can’t tell you what you’ll be doing and he says, I can’t tell you anything except you won’t be paid any less money than you are here. Now when can you come? And I had people in TVA with whom I was associated and had very high regard for them, I talked it over with them and they said, well of course, you’re needed here, but if you find the other thing in your mind is of more importance or more interest to you, well go on. So, I went down to the hotel and told Colonel Warren and said, alright a week from Monday I’ll join you and he says, I’ll meet you here and take you out there. Well it turned out that that man had gone throughout TVA and had picked and selected people that he wanted, as it turned out, to come to Oak Ridge, which to the best of my knowledge at that time was not even Oak Ridge. It was just a place where people knew a lot of things were going on and nearly all of it was being done by the Army. I came with him and he stopped by an employment office and there were signs around saying Tennessee Eastman Corporation and he said these are the people who are going to put you on the payroll. Then he says, when that’s done, why you’ll come with me, which I and several other people did. We then came through Clinton and through what was even then known as Elza Gate, and we were taken up to a building that was almost completed which was the old AEC building. It looked like a huge Army barracks that sat where the new AEC building now does.
Interviewer: What they use to call the Castle on the Hill?
Mr. Elza (continues): The Castle on the Hill or the Platinum Palace, it had quite a few names, some of which were even respectful. It was called, I think, generally referred to, as Army Headquarters in those days and the building was still in the process of being built. So when he introduced me to a man by the name of Matt Taylor who had been brought here from Tennessee Eastman. Matt told me, he said, the most important thing we have to do right now, is to determine the chemical process that we’ll be working on, what kinds of jobs the whole process can be broken down into, and how many people will be needed to do each process, and then how will we train those people to do the work that was necessary to be done. I had, prior to entering law school, I had studied psychology and personnel and public administration. He said we want you to work on that, ‘cause if we don’t get this part of it done we can’t go on. And he said we have some people here from Eastman who are acquainted with the Eastman system of, as they put it, developing wage standards, so you are assigned to that. Learn all you can, do all the work you can. Back then, as I recall in February or March of ’43, was my first immediate and direct association with Oak Ridge. Now, back then became, following TVA, the next great wild-eyed exciting adventure of my life and probably one of the four or five events in my life time in East Tennessee that was of greatest importance to the region and the surrounding country. Of course I became immediately and intimately involved, and being a person of some curiosity and in those days almost unrelented energy, and rather non-discriminating enthusiasm for anything and everything going on, I entered whole heartedly into just about everything that was going on.
At that time the very eastern most of what is now the Georgia Ave and Delaware Kentucky area, they were in process of converting the raw ridge into a housing community. The dormitories along the Turnpike, men’s and women’s and the big cafeteria, which incidentally was a terrible place to eat, was located just south of where Jackson Square now is. It burned down I guess maybe 15 years ago. But that was the only place to eat at that time and it was always dreadfully crowded…
……[break in tape]…..
...since square area was, of course, at that time the only place for people to do any shopping of any kind at all, and since it was war time many people had actually come to Oak Ridge without automobiles. It was quite difficult to get around in those days, although the Roane Anderson Company which later became Management Services operated what was a free transportation system, although it wasn’t frequent enough to accommodate what everyone wished. The housewives would have to use this transportation system to get back and forth to Jackson Square to do their shopping. All back in the woods behind the houses there had been boardwalks built throughout the townsite, so that very few people used the roads when they were walking. They went everywhere they needed to go on the boardwalks. Our house, the first house, one I believe of the 500 that were finished in Oak Ridge, my recollection is it was located at 131 Georgia, which is quite a ways back up behind the football field. My wife, realizing of course, that I was working in 8,10,12,14 hours a day, had to face the full burden of all the shopping for the family. I may have mentioned before, we had three small children, the eldest being 6 and the youngest being, I suppose, about 5 or 6 months old. So she would be worthwhile getting on recording too, if you could censor the language as to what she had to tolerate.
In those days the roads of course were unpaved and that gives rise to all the stories one hears about the enormous amount of mud that existed in Oak Ridge and there weren’t any sidewalks either. One had to rely on the road itself or else the boardwalks, which were built down through the woods to places. And the transportation system, while it was free and was adequate under normal circumstances, no one considered themselves to be living under normal circumstances and that then made it inadequate. The other aspect of it was is that the first and foremost responsibility of the transportation system was to get people back and forth to work. As you know it’s a good many miles to X-10 from the Townsite area, and its quite some miles to Y-12 and it’s a good many more miles down to K-25. Also there were other work centers in those days and a goodly number of people were caught here without automobiles and with gas rationing and that sort of thing and many people who were my age and younger, were facing the prospect of military service. And some, as I had done, not too long before, had simply disposed of an automobile since the market was good for them and it appeared that we might be called for military service. So there weren’t too many automobiles. The transportation system gave rise to a problem, which in the people’s efforts to resolve that problem in turn gave rise to the formation of a town council. The proposal was made that individuals be charged for the transportation, and many people resented that very strongly and attacked the policy, which in effect had been issued as an order from the Manhattan District. Well that pointed up and gave focus to, a great many resentments that the large number of people coming in here had stored up about the manner in which they were ordered and shoved and in effect pushed around, often against what they’d been accustomed to, and totally out of keeping with what one might find in a normal community. And it was felt by some they were being treated essentially as though they were a private in a great big army and a good many of them they couldn’t remember being inducted in any army and so they were resentful of it. As the matter grew and attempts were made to collect for the transportation, a group of us at work felt that this kind of thing was going to be severely limiting in what we could do to get enough people to accomplish the work that there was to be done, and to even keep the people here who were already here and who were growing more and more disgruntled. There was simultaneously going on the process of army contracts being made with retail stores, which would provide the services. Those stores, one must say, took it as though they had a captive clientele and they, through their prices, were dreadfully exploiting people in their prices. Subsequently and after the war, a number of them were arrested and charged with, yes, I don’t know that anything much ever came of it because some of them were rather powerful men, but they actually had charges against them for price sealing evasions and that sort of thing. But that was a good many years later.
In hashing over these problems at work, we could see that if some basis on which people could live and be satisfied were not established, that the whole project, its goal, objective and the war effort and everything else would suffer rather dreadfully. So a fellow by the name of Hallstead and I called a meeting and invited a number of people, who we felt would share our concern about the matter. And so, when in my house on Georgia Avenue this group of people gathered. The upshot of the meeting was that we would call a Town Meeting at the high school, which was located near Jackson Square. We asked Blankenship who was superintendent of schools to serve with the group. Then we got the loan of an automobile with a loud speaker on it, and a number of us paraded it around over Oak Ridge announcing and calling the first Town Meeting of Oak Ridge. Well, to our amazement, the auditorium was filled and people crowded out along the outside of the high school. I had been designated as the individual to open the meeting and conduct it, thinking first that it was to be simply an opportunity for the people of Oak Ridge to voice their gripes and complaints and grievances. We’d ask some of the Army staff who were in command to come to the meeting for the purpose of listening and learning what was on the collective mind of people. As the meeting developed, some of the army representatives felt called upon to respond to various questions and statements and grievances that were raised, and as a result the thing threatened to break out into something resembling a little local war there. And the Army then, we understand, considered very carefully whether they would even allow such meetings, because of what apparently could have happened, but didn’t, at the first one. That news got back to us. We’ve never had any way of knowing whether it in fact was true or not but we felt that that made it really all the more important that such meetings be held, because we felt that it was very fundamental to the community that they have some recourse established to arbitrary or even capricious decisions that were being made that weighed heavily upon their every day life and the welfare of their families and children, having to do with the availability of food and clothing and shelter and transportation and medical care, the very basic needs on which an individual depends for his living, for his existence, for his enjoyment of life. We, then, decided the only thing to do was, very promptly, to call another meeting and once again an enormous crowd came out. So we put the proposition to the Town Meeting which we were deliberately calling it by that time and said to them that we felt that there should be an elected representative body, upon which the citizenry could rely for listening and hearing and understanding problems and then negotiating with the Manhattan District officers who were in charge, and/or the top management of the various companies that were here. And in those days, there must have been, maybe as many as 15 or 20 companies. We then asked that there be a motion on the floor, as to whether there should be such an elected group in Oak Ridge, and it was essentially unanimous that there would be. So we then announced the next meeting and appointed a group of people to work with drawing up what amounted to a charter, bylaws of this Town Council. At the following meeting, which we set a date, for once again a very large crowd showed up. We presented a very simple, I wish I had it, it would be a nice document to have but I don’t, it was a very simple thing stating what the purpose and the scope of activities of this elected Council would be, and how many, my recollection was 7, and ask for a motion of adoption which was almost unanimously passed and then we asked for nominations as to people who would serve on this. Well Hallstead was elected, Blankenship was elected, I was elected and Mrs. Matt Taylor was elected, a fellow by the name of Westfall was elected and there was another one or two whose names don’t come immediately to mind. Then we sat and scheduled regular Town Meetings, and as problems would arise, we would make the proper contact with the authorities and attempt to work out some resolution of the problem, which would accomplish the basic objectives of the Manhattan District. It would facilitate the accomplishment of the work by contractors and it would be to the extent possible, palatable or acceptable by the people. Well the Town Council remained in effect up until the time of the incorporation of the City of Oak Ridge, and no doubt served a very valuable and useful function in the City in that what amounted to a brand new community of almost spontaneous growth, didn’t fly apart, or fall apart in the very early stages of its growth. So I think most people involved would be willing to accept the view that it played a constructive and productive role in Oak Ridge.
In those days almost everyone, certainly the great majority of those who were in positions of responsibility and authority had been brought here from some place else. As a result, relatively few people were native in those categories, and at social meetings, and there were a great deal of them in those days, regardless of the hardships in getting around, there just weren’t any other lines of recreation. As a result people would simply get together and have card parties or a game party or dinners or social gatherings and that sort of thing. One generally met almost the same faces as one still does in Oak Ridge. You can go to 10 different meetings on 10 diverse subjects and if there are 50 people there, 30 of them will be in the same faces that you’ve seen at all 10. In those days one of the most common questions when you’ve spied a face that you didn’t know was to say - and where are you from? It was always taken for granted that no one was from here. So one evening at such a gathering at the guest house, now the Alexander, and one of these dowager types from Cambridge, Massachusetts came up to me and said, Mr. Elza, where are you from? I said, well ma’am I’m from right here. She said you mean you were born here? I said, Yes ma’am. And she said, and you grew up here? And I said, yes ma’am, right here. And she turned to her husband across the room and she says, oh dear come here. And she says, they’re training some of the natives to work on the project. And that’s how rare you see it was that it was a thing of surprise if you found someone that happened to be born and grew up right here. I remained here until about August or September, maybe October of 1944. This fellow Hallstead, about whom I spoke earlier, had left a couple of months before and gone back up to New York. He had gotten involved in a group that were planning the rehabilitation of the countries that had been at war. This group ultimately grew to become the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration. He telephoned me one day and said that he thought it was going to be a very exciting adventure and that if I were interested, to let him know. I had prospects in mind of the world opening up for me, and in a very short time called him and told him that I was interested and went up to see the people and was offered then the opportunity to go abroad and work with the military forces in planning the industrial health and civil restoration of nations as they were liberated. Had in the back of my mind if it were possible to get to China that’s where I wanted to go. Well as luck would have it, I did end up being assigned to China and the relationship of that assignment to Oak Ridge is, as I mentioned when we were closing the other day, that many people who were here, had in fact deduced what was going on here, without a doubt, they didn’t know how and they didn’t know who and they didn’t know where things were being done. But the basic objective of creating a weapon out of splitting the atom, there were a large number of people that realized that and understood it, although they never spoke to one another about it. There were enough bits and pieces around that if a person had in some basic knowledge, cared to try to put those pieces together, he could see where the arrow was pointing. As a result after I had gone overseas in late ’44, I had this expectation in my mind that the war very probably would last not very long and it couldn’t last long after this weapon was used. Due to a variety of reasons it developed that I was in the Chunking Central Hospital in China, had been ill two or three weeks, China’s a great place to get ill, if one seeks that sort of thing. So I was in the hospital the night when the first bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. At first of course I wasn’t aware of what had happened, but this great noise and excitement broke out all over the hospital, and I grabbed one of the nurses and I said, what on earth’s all the uproar and excitement about and she said to me, she says, a great new kind of bomb has been dropped on Japan and we think the war is over. Well I knew of course what had happened and the following morning I asked an acquaintance of mine who was on General -?Whitemire’s? – staff, if he could get a cablegram off to Lee Warren in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. He said, well sure he could manage that, he said what should it say? And I said, just simply say, Congratulations, the racetracks of Tennessee have spawned the winner, knowing of course that Warren would know what it was about and knowing also that maybe General Whitemire and some others would be kind of puzzled. So after I got back home someone had saved me a copy of the Y-12 newspaper in which that cablegram had been published and that terminated that period of my relationship to Oak Ridge until 1948 when I, yes?
Interviewer: Something we need to put in here, you told me the other day what the racetrack’s relation was to but we did not get it on tape. I would like to get that on the tape.
Mr. Elza: Well the electromagnetic process of separating Uranium 235 is the calutron process. Now when these things are set up, they’re set up inside a huge magnet. These magnets are laid out in the shape of a racetrack, they are an elliptical shape. Then all of the units that are operating to separate the Uranium 235 being of course the fissionable isotope of Uranium that you want, in order to get fission and get the weapon. Due to their shape, and there were a whole series of these things like racetracks and they are quite large, all of us that worked, referred to them as racetracks. And that then meant of course, and it turned out in fact that the material that lead to the bomb was in fact done I understand in Y-12 and that’s where it came from. So there had been some work that was somewhat successful. Of course they didn’t do the weapon there, that was done in Los Alamos, the mechanics of it and the plutonium that was used subsequently was done at Hanford. The K-25 plant made no immediate contribution to that aspect of the thing.
[side 2]
In 1948 I returned home from the Far East and had saved little money and I thought well when this whole mess started, I was in law school, so I’ll go back to law school. But, other things had happened too. I found that the $7 or 8 thousand that I had saved, really didn’t amount to much in 1948 as compared to 1940-1941, and it became clear to me in a very short while that that wasn’t going to get me too far. So, not having any additional children, but still having the same three, I felt that well I’m not going to make it all the way through so I’d better hunt a job. Around September when I was trying to make up my mind, do I register for school or do I hunt a job, I heard of a new organization being founded in Oak Ridge, and I came out to talk to some people I knew to try to find out a little bit about what kind of an organization is it, what are it’s objectives, who are the people involved and so forth. I learned that it was being called the Oak Ridge Institute of Nuclear Studies. It seemed to be a type of organization that accorded a great deal of my concepts of what I ought to do, not only to earn my living but a way to spend my time. And so I found out where they had an office and I went around and simply inquired whether or not there were any prospects of a job. Several people talked to me and they finally took me in to talk to a fellow named William G. Pollard. After about a 15 minutes talk with him, why he decided, I suppose, that yes there were opportunities for a job, and maybe I should start work right away since they were commencing to staff up for some programs. So that then led to my coming back to Oak Ridge in late October, early November of 1948 and I haven’t been away for any great length of time since then. Now, that is the Oak Ridge connection so far as I’m concerned. If you’re interested in other aspects of it, why then I’ll put myself at your mercy and see what else you might be interested in. I realize I haven’t covered all the topics but I’ve certainly outlined and sketched in my personal association. I don’t know that that’s of any great interest to anybody but in any event you now have it on tape.
Interviewer: I have found it very interesting. There were some other things that I was interested in and that is sort of the impact that Oak Ridge had on the surrounding area, or were you so enclosed within the gates that you didn’t have too much contact with….
Mr. Elza (continues): I suppose most people here had 98% of their existence inside the gates. Since I was native to the region, that was not the case with me because I had relatives and my school and everything else was outside the gates. As a result then, if I could remember it well enough, I ought to be in a somewhat better position. The first thing, I suppose, that was noticeable was a high degree of suspicion on the part of people living in the surrounding area who had already begun to develop second thoughts about TVA. They had by this time you see had 10-12 years of TVA and they had seen engineers and surveyors come into an area, roam around driving stakes and looking through spy glasses, as they called them, and then very shortly here came people insisting that they sell their land and move off of it. So there was this aura of suspicion and expectancy that seems to permeate the immediately surrounding area. Many people had the feeling and many people actually experienced individuals coming to them and saying we want your land, we want it now and we want you out of here, you see. That is not the better way of wanting friends and influencing people. Now, the second thing that I can recall and built into this background of suspicion and rather gloomy expectancy was the fact that relatively few people seemed to be getting jobs here.
Interviewer: You mean from the local area?
Mr. Elza (continues): From the local area, relatively few. They could see these hundreds and hundreds of people moving back and forth. They knew something was going on. They knew someone was paying but when they sought jobs, there were very few jobs for them.
Interviewer: That would be a source of quite a lot of resentment, I would think.
Mr. Elza (continues): It aroused more of this suspicion and doubt and then it became common for people outside the Oak Ridge area to be harshly critical of whatever went on. They seemed to play up in the newspapers if anyone from Oak Ridge was charged with theft or drunkenness or getting into a fight or something like that. The newspapers played it up and it enhanced Oak Ridge’s reputation in the surrounding area, you see, as being something just not quite right and not entirely welcomed. One doesn’t have to look too far or too deeply to find that some of that sentiment persists to this day. One other aspect of it was that those people who came seeking employment were always impressed with the demand for higher education. They were always impressed with the fact that they didn’t have it and that they couldn’t be considered until and unless they did have it. As a result then there seemed to be ingrained in the surrounding area, that it was a bunch of high brow crack pots that ran the place, and that gave rise to humor among the population, you see, and one needn’t look too far to find some residual elements of that kind of attitude on the part of people who were in the surrounding area. As a result there was a basic cleavage in the indigent, indigenous I should say, population as compared to those who had been brought in and concentrated in order to accomplish the work. But as time went on and the demands of construction became overwhelming, the demands of production became overwhelming, then it was learned that you could take people out of the surrounding area, the hills, the coalmines, the mountains, the farms, and you could bring them in and they had a very high native intelligence and they could be trained easily, quickly and well and they could be relied upon and depended upon actually to accomplish complex, difficult, highly skilled work. And now, I suppose, before the thing was over, maybe 30-40% of the total people employed actually came, not from the immediate vicinity, but from the general vicinity taking in Tennessee, Kentucky, North Carolina, Georgia, Alabama and so forth. So that tended to break down some of this and it began to establish contacts and so forth.
So that the people in Oak Ridge didn’t feel that it was a dangerous area outside that fence, and if they were to step out it they ran the risk of a deputy sheriff grabbing them, which literally did happen of course, you see. Because in those days the state of Tennessee had, what was known as the J P and fee grabbing system. That the sheriff and these deputies essentially lived off of fees made by arrest, you see. And the Justice of the Peace was referred to as the J P system and the J P system became known as judgment for the plaintiff, which meant of course that you were guilty as soon as you were charged, and you were fined and then you had to pay the court cost and those court cost were the fees. Now we had that system here, yeah, and there were people who got caught because there were, I am told, some sheriffs and so forth around here, that saw this great influx of population, and they knew they were employed, and they knew they didn’t care to fight minor cases and so it was a great source of fees, you see. But fortunately that sort of thing didn’t go on too much and it didn’t go on too long and it resolved itself.
The other thing was that with this enormous influx of population, I believe if I’m not mistaken, they had somewhere near 80,000 employed here at the very peak in a relatively small geographic area, so that there were shortages of anything and everything. Not only was it wartime but here was a concentration of one of the biggest activities going on, and in a small area, and in an area that was not heavily populated there to fore. Accordingly, everything was short. You never could find enough of anything. As a result the people outside tended to blame that on Oak Ridge. As the shortages increased, the prices rose, and so the people in Oak Ridge, not only were they victimized by the prices being charged, but they took the blame for the prices going up everywhere in the surrounding territory. That didn’t exactly endear the community to its neighbors around you see. The schools were all over crowded. The movie theatres were over crowded. The places to eat were over crowded and it was always them damned Oak Ridgers that were creating the clutter and the bother. Well, to some extent it was true, you see, and to some extent there was a reason that we weren’t beloved by our neighbors. So generally speaking those were the major factors. Now in the course of time, of course, this influx of large numbers of people with what at that time could be considered extraordinary levels of education, gradually impressed surrounding communities so that now the educational aspirations, the aspirations for healthcare, the aspirations for skilled employment, the family standards of conduct and behavior have been influenced both ways. I suppose Oak Ridge is not as high-hat as it once was. The surrounding area has recognized benefits that flow from association with Oak Ridge and that has gone, I’m satisfied, like waves on a pond, it has an extending influence as far away as you get. Now another thing, and its importance it seems to me, that one shouldn’t overlook is the essential nature of TVA to the location of Oak Ridge being where it is. Had it not been that this capability of generating enormous quantities of electrical energy existed here, it would so have changed the time scale of having concurrently to build this power capability, that it might well have been located elsewhere. But here you had TVA and you had the power generating capability and at one time I understand, we used more electricity in this area because of the plants, production plants then was used at that time by the City of New York. So if one hears that kind of thing, then one realizes how important TVA was to it. Now another aspect of the importance of TVA is that many of the experienced people who came here, came from TVA.
Interviewer: No one was aware of that.
Mr. Elza (continues): That’s right. There’s a rather large cadre of people who came here and they played their role, of course, in the general success of the thing. Some of them were extraordinarily able people like Lee Warren, for instance, but there were of course others. The most prominent one came in to effect in 1948 name David Lilienthal. He had not only played a very significant role in the location of Oak Ridge here, but in 1946 he was one of the group that played a leading role in the founding of Oak Ridge Institute of Nuclear Studies. So you could see how there was a network and a meshing of lives and influences throughout this thing. Had it not been for things of that sort it is doubtful if Oak Ridge would have been as successful as it was or that it would have flourished as it has, you see. So those are rather significant influences on Oak Ridge.
Interviewer: Do you feel that there was much resentment among the people who were actually displaced; the people who owned land in the area that was taken over, particularly so soon after Norris had taken over a lot of land?
Mr. Elza (continues): To call it ‘much’ of course presupposes some kind of a standard above this it’s much and below it it's not much. My personal impression is that in so far as Oak Ridge was concerned, it was not nearly the resentment that one found in the case of some of TVA’s places.
Interviewer: Well now I think that’s significant.
Mr. Elza (continues): I think it’s significant also but there again one needs to keep in mind that TVA had pioneered that sort of thing in this area. The sort of thing of demanding that people get the hell off their land and give it to something else that they don’t fully understand, but there are other factors in my opinion too. One of them is that we were at war, we were in rather desperate circumstances up until that time. Remember things hadn’t gone entirely well for us and people were in the mood of sacrifice. They were in the mood of being cooperative. You could stop a man on the street and tell him, persuasively, that you needed the coat off his back for the war effort and chances are at that moment he’d shuck his coat off and hand it to you and never look back. So that you had a wholly different set of circumstances.
Interviewer: And attitudes.
Mr. Elza (continues): And yeah, a willingness and simply by telling the people we need it for the war effort, you had a situation, which was more susceptible to acceptance in that, I felt, some of course resented it, particularly the elderly. The elderly who have lived all their life essentially in one place and they know and love every rock and tree and blade of grass, and then when they see bulldozers sweeping it into a pile of dust and burning it, it hurts, you see.
Interviewer: terrible experience…
Mr. Elza (continues): Yes and, for the elderly, it was primarily. I never heard any of the middle aged or younger generation protest much, but I did hear some of the elderly speak rather bitterly about it or perhaps nostalgically or longingly and wanting their place back. It was always the “homeplace” that they spoke of you see. Among people in East Tennessee the connotations of the term “homeplace” are rather profound. I know that personally, you see, which is one reason I never wanted to leave East Tennessee because I have that in my make up and my character. I love the mountains and the hills and the earth and the rivers and so forth. No place else is home and I can’t make it that way and don’t really want to. That’s something of the character of the people. Also there’s a fierce independence and the indominitable kind of characteristic. They don’t want to be shoved around and pushed against their will, and that didn’t sit too well with the Army way of doing things either, you see. And so there wasn’t exactly a setting for love.
Interviewer: I think perhaps these are some of the elements of the “town gown” conflict you see at the university towns too.
Mr. Elza (continues): Yes, I suppose. I don’t know enough about it really to disagree with that, but I have the feeling that the “gown” part of it has looked upon that alleged conflict of “town and gown” as being one other way that the “gown” can acquire for itself a little greater status, a little more prestige, a little more aura of beneficence because in arraying itself against the alleged “town” it is saying we have no time for the common places of this world, we have no time for commoners, we have no time for the lesser ilk of humanity. I don’t believe that that element which one might characterize as being a town plays any role in that so called “town gown” bit.
Interviewer: I think that’s very perceptive.
Mr. Elza (continues); I think the gown does it because the gown wants to be the gown, and wants everyone to know it’s the gown, and doesn’t like the idea of not being distinctive and so they array themselves in this adversary attitude and actually you won’t want it on your tape but I have to say it. It’s a crock of crap. Because frankly that’s what I think of it. I have, I suppose, some reason to call myself in either camp or both, but I recognize my fellow man as best I can for what he is. I do the best I can to recognize myself for that. And so I’m amused by it just as I am by a kitten playing with a ball of yarn and I’m amused by the antics of children, so the antics of adults is not unamusing including many of my own I assure you. But that’s a bit of fakery. It may not be elsewhere but the gown part of Oak Ridge has so aspired to be something like the University of Chicago or Harvard and so if you don’t have any basis for it, make one.
Interviewer: I agree.
Mr. Elza (continues): And this is part of their making one. That’s the way I see it. I don’t care whether I’m right or wrong, because I look upon the whole thing as being essentially meaningless and nonsubstantive. Well what other area do you have there?
Interviewer: Well I have covered most of the main areas but I do have a few other questions. Your children went to school in Oak Ridge all the way through school, is that right?
Mr. Elza (continues): Yes, except of course for the time we were gone, yes. All of them graduated from high school here and then my youngest brother was killed during the war. In accordance with the agreement among the brothers, why I took the children and reared them when their mother became ill and subsequently died. And so I had two other children who also grew up here and graduated. Then one of the girls went to Smith and one went to Holyoke and the boy went to George Washington, that’s Carl, my son, as well as the University of Tennessee. Jane, the other girl, not my daughter, graduated the University of Tennessee and Mike, my own son graduated University of Tennessee. So the whole flock went to school here and are now gone, only one child lives in Oak Ridge. As a matter of fact only one lives in Tennessee.
Interviewer: Did you feel that the Oak Ridge schools were different from the ordinary run of schools? Did you have any different feelings about those?
Mr. Elza (continues): Of course the implications of the ordinary run of schools is enough to get into the town gown bit again because Oak Ridge is guilty of that kind of thing, of thinking whatever is in Oak Ridge is exceptional, whatever outside is ordinary. Well that, to some extent, there may be a basis for that but it isn’t entirely true. Knoxville had extraordinarily fine schools and for the life of me, I couldn’t see any very significant difference in the quality of say the grammar schools in Knoxville and the grammar schools in Oak Ridge of that day. I could see reason to be prouder of the Oak Ridge schools because they have accomplished such an enormous amount in a very limited period of time, you see. But subsequently, I did feel that the Oak Ridge schools developed greater quality because they had much, much more money. When you compare what is spent on a child, lets say, in Woodland School to what is spent on a child in some small county school, particularly going back to 1943-‘47, the difference was great. Now, if you try to compare the quality of education per dollar spent, then you’ve got another standard on your hands and you begin doubting, are you truly getting that extraordinary value for the extraordinary amount of money. I’m inclined to think that Oak Ridge schools are among the best in the state and possibly even in the southeast. How much of that is a reflection of loyalty or pride in Oak Ridge, I don’t know, but that is the opinion I have.
Interviewer: Well that’s usually spoken of as one of the advantages of living in Oak Ridge. If you could mention what you thought of as advantages and disadvantages, over the years, I mean, not so much right now, but over the time that you have been here.
Mr. Elza (continues): It may have grown to be that, at the time of the formation of Oak Ridge in its early growth, I’m not sure it was so true. I am sure that those of us who were interested in attracting and retaining people here, we preached that doctrine because we wanted it to be true, and we knew that it was an important element in attracting and keeping people. Accordingly it may have been that we ultimately came to believe it ourselves. Or it could be that that kind of necessity, in fact, demanded extraordinarily good schools and did produce them. In the very early days, I simply don’t believe this was true. I think things were really too upset and too much turmoil, too many people were…….[break in tape] the last word on the other side got caught, but what I was saying is that the formation of the schools here had a man, A.H. Blankenship, who was as close an approach to an educator genius as I’ve ever known in a person of extraordinary energy and drive and enthusiasm. All the time I ever knew him I never saw him in any state of despair or disappointment. He had an optimistic fresh outlook on things and it required a person like that to generate a school system from nothing up to, I presume at that time, maybe caring for 10,000 kids. That’s one heck of a lot of people to put in school, at all levels of grades, and of course teachers weren’t the easiest people to come by. It was hard to attract them into a strange atmosphere, under strange circumstances, you see. That is the fundamental element in the quality of a school regardless of buildings and equipment and budget and so forth. The fundamental element is, and it took them a while to develop a cadre of extraordinary special students and I’m reasonably sure that the schools weren’t all that extraordinary in the early days.
Now you asked where else had I lived in Oak Ridge. The only other place is at 70 Outer Drive and that’s where Delaware comes into Outer Drive. I moved back in there, I believe it was 1950, best of my recollection because I came here in late ’48. It was still rather difficult to get housing and so I had to stand in line and wait. I believe in the spring of 1950 I moved there and have been there ever since. The kids essentially grew up there and went to school. That is the home and I might say my homeplace now. So what else?
Interviewer: Something which we sort of skipped over, we were talking about the advantages and disadvantages of living in Oak Ridge, do you feel that there are any disadvantages or were in the past?
Mr. Elza (continues): You’re speaking as of today?
Interviewer: Well I mean over the years really, once the war was over and ….
Mr. Elza (continues): Of course there’s very fundamental advantages as far as I’m concerned and that is that it located in East Tennessee.
Interviewer: Well I think that’s fundamental advantage too.
Mr. Elza (continues): And that’s home because, of course, you had the mountains and the lakes and you have tolerable climate that’s scarcely ever extreme either way, and that I think is an advantage to being in East Tennessee. That’s no particular advantage to being in Oak Ridge however because you could go across the river and have essentially the same advantages. The advantage in Oak Ridge today, which is most noticeable, is traffic and parking. You never had problems of parking like you do have, have in any other city I know, of the size and certainly not the same you have in larger cities. I can’t think of any extraordinary or very special advantage to be in Oak Ridge, based on Oak Ridge itself. I feel that there are some disadvantages. I think one doesn’t have ready and immediate access to the variety of market to take care of his needs that he would have in some other places. I think that he is in Oak Ridge in greater isolation than he would be in Knoxville, Nashville, Chattanooga and so forth. There are, in my opinion, inherent advantages in living in a smaller town as compared to metropolitan center, all having to do with less congestion, congestion of people, congestion of problems as well as traffic. I think Oak Ridge is an extraordinary town for its size in that it has the symphony, it has a ballet group, it has an Art Center, it has the theatre. It has, getting off into other fields, it has a rifle association and it has all kinds of sports and community organizations. Many, many larger much larger cities don’t have the variety of life, the variety of opportunity for association that Oak Ridge has, and it is small enough so that a person can grasp it, comprehend it, even embrace it if he wishes. It isn’t an elusive place. It isn’t as are some cities, a fearful place, a place of danger and threat. That makes it then, a place coupled with at least good schools and coupled with recreational opportunities in an extraordinarily fine place to live and have kids grow up. And it has been that ever since, I suppose, soon after the war was over. During the period of the war, however, it was in fact something quite different, you see, going up to 1949, I’d say. Then, there were unbelievable disadvantages to living here, but it was in such a framework of adventure and in such a framework of excitement, it had all kinds of ingredients of opportunity to work, work hard, work constructively. The feeling that one truly was accomplishing something, was a part of something big tended so much to compensate for the physical hardships, that they were of no consequence. It seemed to me that everyone accepted them, almost everyone. Those who didn’t, I believe were in a small minority but, Lord, just the process of getting garbage hauled, the process of dealing with coal furnaces. The process of getting coal, at times, was a struggle and the process of course with ration existed here and every place else. And transportation, hell, transportations is a problem in Oak Ridge today. If the family doesn’t have at least two automobiles or three or four, it is, it’s a grievous problem. The feeling of being a part of something that was momentous and historic can compensate for all kinds of problems and did. It was on that people tended to keep their sanity and keep their enthusiasm. What else do you have?
Interviewer: Well I think I’ve pretty well covered my questions and I certainly thank you for ……
[tape stops and restarts]
Mr. Elza (continues): You called to my memory the problem of shopping. This was a hardship that was mostly peculiar to the housewives and I realize in this day and age you aren’t suppose to use that term, but anyway in those days there were housewives. They would have to go and line up and sometimes 30 minutes to an hour or longer, in a line, at a meat counter, holding a number in their hand, and when their number was called then they would go up and would be told what meat there was. And if they had sufficient coupons then they could buy whatever it was, whether it was ground beef or sausage or what not. It was that way for almost all commodities that were under any kind of ration. What maybe now is a 15-minute stop at a store, could consume a whole half morning in trying to get what was necessary to keep the family together. Now men experienced that too because in the barber shop, which I believe at that time was about 12 chairs at Jackson Square, men would come in, say at 9 o’clock, and get a number for a haircut, go on about his business, maybe for an hour or two hours, and then come back and wait for his number to be called. Now if his number were called while he was gone, he had to turn in his number and get a new number and start over again, you see. And at that time men had their hair cut much more frequently than they do now. So with some and with almost everyone this was a biweekly ordeal. You had to dedicate either a Saturday morning or a Saturday afternoon to getting a haircut. Many of that kind of thing, you see, even if you had an automobile, why you had to have your ration coupons and then you would have to stand in line to get up to a gasoline pump where you could get gasoline. Those were actually hardships but they were hardships on a relative basis. They were hardships on the basis of what we now know and in those days, no one enjoyed it but you didn’t look upon it as being such a hardship, you see.
Transcribed: August 2005
Typed by LB

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ORAL HISTORY OF PAUL ELZA
Interviewed by Sibyl Nestor
November 1973
Interviewer: This is an interview with Mr. Paul Elza, made in November 1973. Mr. Elza is Assistant Director of Oak Ridge Associated Universities.
Mr. Elza: When I moved to the Oak Ridge area we lived actually in Knox County a few miles away, although subsequently after the family first came to this region on my mother’s side along about the time of the Revolutionary War, some of the family did move to Clinton and we have relatives in Clinton. On my father’s side we’re Swiss German stock. On my mother’s side we’re Scotch Irish and Welsh. The Welsh side of the family had come from coal mining people and that I presume, attracted them to this part of the country. My father and grandfather on my father’s side were woodwork craftsman from Switzerland and there was, in the Northwest part of Knoxville, an area that referred to as a Swiss Colony in some time in the mid to late 1840’s. The Swiss began coming to this part of the country and my father’s folks joined them there. So, I never until Oak Ridge started, actually lived in the Oak Ridge area, although we visited in Clinton and area known as Wheat, which is approximately where the Gaseous Diffusion Plant now is. I can recall when I was in high school playing football down about where the entrance to K-25 is, there was a football field there. And, on the way to the football games, the team would stop at a large spring and this spring had a few benches and tables around it. In those days a trip from Knoxville to Wheat was considered quite a trip, especially for a group of kids, high school age. So we’d set out for the football game about 10:30 or 11:00. We would stop at the large spring on the highway from Clinton to Wheat and that spring is still flowing and it flows out where the Oak Ridge Municipal Swimming Pool is. That was a sort of a center and a stopping area where people traveling would simply pack a lunch and stop there. So the football team would do that and then go on to the game.
The whole area where Oak Ridge is now located, best of my recollection, had a rather minor highway running through it and connected about where Robertsville Road now is, with the highway that ran North and South. The other highway ran East and West in Clinton on down toward Kingston. Where the highway in Clinton passed under the railroad, the L & N Railroad, there was a little station there that had been built at the time when the railroad was built. My grandfather’s brother was a construction engineer on the L & N Railroad, and as you may be aware, there are, I believe, two or three tunnels between Knoxville and Dosset or Marlow. On the L& N Railroad, according to him, the railroad was a long time moving and passing through this particular area. The necessity for building tunnels made it a long range construction job. Of course that particular uncle had long since died by the time Oak Ridge came into being, and anyone else in the family other than a sister of my father who was still living at the time Oak Ridge was founded. This little railroad station was named Elza, which happens to be the family name. And it in fact showed on some of the maps, and I understand in some listings of post office directories, that this little spot was known as Elza, Tennessee. I went to this man, who incidentally died too a year later, being the age I was then I had no great interest, I had too many other things to occupy my attention, so I never followed up on this as thoroughly and carefully as I should, and of course upon her death I presumed, just about all knowledge of the matter died with her, but she told me this story. Her uncle, my great-uncle, being a construction engineer and being located at that point because there was a highway in the short distance east there, they were building a bridge across the Clinch River, as well as the tunnels and then they had to build the overpass over the highway from Clinton. It meant then that that became a construction center for quite a long while, and trains coming out would have loads of supplies and materials and construction equipment and so forth on them and to know where to drop those materials off, and to know to whom they were assigned. The little shack that they put up there, they painted on it, the name ELZA. And when the train would see that, then they would know, well okay, this is where this part of the material and so forth was thrown off. And being near a highway, then you could move it relatively easily elsewhere. It then, in that spot, became known as Elza Station, and subsequently some mapmakers picked it up and called it Elza, Tennessee.
When the Manhattan Corp of Engineers came here, and they named this Clinton Engineer Works, the railroad and the river made a rather natural boundary. In knowing that they were going to have to maintain the rigorous security they then made that the boundary in the fence, around the place. Because the highway was there, and there was a tiny little railroad station there, they then constructed an entrance way to the Oak Ridge area. That entrance way became known as Elza Gate to Oak Ridge. And I suppose for a good long while, it probably was the most used and the most common gate, because what is now the Solway Road to Knoxville, was a winding crooked little road called Solway, but the highway that exists now was not built then. As a result there wasn’t a great deal of traffic coming into Oak Ridge in that direction. Most traffic went to Clinton and then came across through Elza Gate. In 1949, I suppose it was, best I can remember, when they decided they would open the gates. The ceremony to symbolize the lessening of security in the area was then held at Elza Gate and movie films and all that sort of thing were done. Now that is the family connection, and I am native to this part of the country, as of course there are or were, my two sisters and four brothers. They’re all gone now except one sister, and she lives in California. But none of the family had any direct or immediate connection with Oak Ridge except myself. I had been for some years with the Tennessee Valley Authority. The TVA was one of the major things of great importance that happened to this region in my lifetime. And it commenced the year I graduated from high school, and of course those were Great Depression years. And the opportunities for going on to college were quite limited unless an individual were able to work and earn some of the expense. I had gone to work with TVA and it was a delightful, exciting, romantic adventure that was going on. It’s hard for anyone looking back on it roughly 40 years later to realize what a momentous event that it was to this part of the county, and being a bright-eyed-bushy-tailed high school boy, I wanted to go where the excitement was. As events passed during World War II, it became highly important that the United States produce enormous numbers of airplanes. I can recall a headline that came out one day, and I don’t recall what year, but probably about 1940, when President Roosevelt said that the United States would build 50,000 airplanes a year. Now in those days, airplanes were built in the dozens or the hundreds, and this was a wild-eyed goal. In order to do it, they needed tons and tons of aluminum. With the aluminum company at Alcoa being nearby, TVA then undertook to build on a rush-and-crash basis, a number of hydroelectric dams. Norris Dam was already built and in place. They decided to build Cherokee and Douglas Dams. A man by the name of L. G. Warren was assigned as Chief Construction Engineer on Cherokee Dam. He was an extraordinary human being. Now he had been with TVA for some good little while, and as I recall it, 11months from the day they broke ground for Cherokee Dam, they had electric power flowing from that dam to the aluminum company.
Interviewer: Incredible.
Mr. Elza continues: It is indeed incredible and it established all kinds of records and of course it made L. G. Warren something of a hero to all of us youngsters around. I had been attending the University of Tennessee and the Law School, and inside TVA I had an opportunity in their contracts and material divisions to become a supply man for L. G. Warren, which I thought was an extraordinarily exciting assignment. During the course of Cherokee then they decided to build Douglas Dam which isn’t too many miles away but on another river, the French Broad, that is close to the Holston. Lee Warren asked then that I continue in that assignment on Douglas. Douglas Dam was nearing completion in late 1942 and Lee Warren left TVA, I think, on extended leave of absence, to undertake some sort of major construction job, I believe in Mexico. Well, in very late ’42, there were rumblings throughout the country-side about something big going on out near Clinton. But most of the people of my generation, with whom I associated, they were quite busily engaged in many other things, and paid relatively little attention to it. Although, word and rumor began to spread that it was going to be a great artillery range or a bombing practice location, and that caused some concern in the population. Then, rumors would spread and did spread and people would talk at social gatherings, about the secrecy in the place, because all kinds of things went in and nothing ever came out. There was great speculation as to what was going on. Well, it was natural for one of those things about which we all speculated was that it would be some great new secret weapon, and of course that wasn’t too far from the mark. Even among the university community there was also speculation that, is it possible that they had learned how to split the atom. Yes, and could it be that this is in some way connected with that. Some of the people in physics and chemistry knew of the work that had gone on, they’d heard of it at least ????… Neils Bohr and I can recall, this is before I had any association with Oak Ridge, being at the University one evening, and gone to an evening class, and a group of us had gotten together to drink coffee and talk, and some man among us, I don’t remember who, said “If we aren’t working on it, we should be because I am confident the Germans will be.” It was only 2 years later that I recalled that and realized the process of reasoning that he had gone though to come to that conclusion, because it was obvious and logical, and for a person working in the field of physics, he was well aware of some things that were going on outside the country whether he knew some of the things that were going on inside the country, I don’t know. But I recall at the time thinking well, certainly if the Germans were to do any such thing, we would be at their mercy, as would the rest of the world. So, I simply stowed it away in the back of my mind and said, well I hope we’re doing something and thought no more of it, because I was still with the highly exciting adventuresome TVA, and thoroughly happy and content and felt that my career was going on from there assuming that the military and the war didn’t interfere too much. They did interfere somewhat because I was asked to take flight training and did, and flew for a while, but then when I got to advanced training I washed out. At that time, when I had three children, then having washed out of advanced training in the Air Force, I presumed that they were through with me, and so I felt, well I’ll do my bit here with TVA, which was of extreme importance to the need for power and industry associated with the war. Well, I believe it was in February of ’43, I looked up from my desk in TVA and there appeared in the door Lee Warren. He was a brusque sort of rough- talking character and I heard him call out, “Where in the hell’s Elza?” And so I stood up at my desk and held up my hand to wave to him and he came back. He was a rather powerfully built fellow but not very tall, and had a rather glowering presence about him, but a man of great confidence and gentleness and once you got over being afraid of this exterior, which I long since had because I worked with him and was delighted to see him of course. He came back and loomed over my desk and says, “I want you to go with me.” Well I probably would have gone wherever he said at the drop of a hat and I says. Alright when? And he says, Now. I told him, of course, that wasn’t possible, and I’d like to know a little something about it. And he says, I can’t tell you anything about it, and he says, but it isn’t far away, and he says, I can’t tell you what you’ll be doing and he says, I can’t tell you anything except you won’t be paid any less money than you are here. Now when can you come? And I had people in TVA with whom I was associated and had very high regard for them, I talked it over with them and they said, well of course, you’re needed here, but if you find the other thing in your mind is of more importance or more interest to you, well go on. So, I went down to the hotel and told Colonel Warren and said, alright a week from Monday I’ll join you and he says, I’ll meet you here and take you out there. Well it turned out that that man had gone throughout TVA and had picked and selected people that he wanted, as it turned out, to come to Oak Ridge, which to the best of my knowledge at that time was not even Oak Ridge. It was just a place where people knew a lot of things were going on and nearly all of it was being done by the Army. I came with him and he stopped by an employment office and there were signs around saying Tennessee Eastman Corporation and he said these are the people who are going to put you on the payroll. Then he says, when that’s done, why you’ll come with me, which I and several other people did. We then came through Clinton and through what was even then known as Elza Gate, and we were taken up to a building that was almost completed which was the old AEC building. It looked like a huge Army barracks that sat where the new AEC building now does.
Interviewer: What they use to call the Castle on the Hill?
Mr. Elza (continues): The Castle on the Hill or the Platinum Palace, it had quite a few names, some of which were even respectful. It was called, I think, generally referred to, as Army Headquarters in those days and the building was still in the process of being built. So when he introduced me to a man by the name of Matt Taylor who had been brought here from Tennessee Eastman. Matt told me, he said, the most important thing we have to do right now, is to determine the chemical process that we’ll be working on, what kinds of jobs the whole process can be broken down into, and how many people will be needed to do each process, and then how will we train those people to do the work that was necessary to be done. I had, prior to entering law school, I had studied psychology and personnel and public administration. He said we want you to work on that, ‘cause if we don’t get this part of it done we can’t go on. And he said we have some people here from Eastman who are acquainted with the Eastman system of, as they put it, developing wage standards, so you are assigned to that. Learn all you can, do all the work you can. Back then, as I recall in February or March of ’43, was my first immediate and direct association with Oak Ridge. Now, back then became, following TVA, the next great wild-eyed exciting adventure of my life and probably one of the four or five events in my life time in East Tennessee that was of greatest importance to the region and the surrounding country. Of course I became immediately and intimately involved, and being a person of some curiosity and in those days almost unrelented energy, and rather non-discriminating enthusiasm for anything and everything going on, I entered whole heartedly into just about everything that was going on.
At that time the very eastern most of what is now the Georgia Ave and Delaware Kentucky area, they were in process of converting the raw ridge into a housing community. The dormitories along the Turnpike, men’s and women’s and the big cafeteria, which incidentally was a terrible place to eat, was located just south of where Jackson Square now is. It burned down I guess maybe 15 years ago. But that was the only place to eat at that time and it was always dreadfully crowded…
……[break in tape]…..
...since square area was, of course, at that time the only place for people to do any shopping of any kind at all, and since it was war time many people had actually come to Oak Ridge without automobiles. It was quite difficult to get around in those days, although the Roane Anderson Company which later became Management Services operated what was a free transportation system, although it wasn’t frequent enough to accommodate what everyone wished. The housewives would have to use this transportation system to get back and forth to Jackson Square to do their shopping. All back in the woods behind the houses there had been boardwalks built throughout the townsite, so that very few people used the roads when they were walking. They went everywhere they needed to go on the boardwalks. Our house, the first house, one I believe of the 500 that were finished in Oak Ridge, my recollection is it was located at 131 Georgia, which is quite a ways back up behind the football field. My wife, realizing of course, that I was working in 8,10,12,14 hours a day, had to face the full burden of all the shopping for the family. I may have mentioned before, we had three small children, the eldest being 6 and the youngest being, I suppose, about 5 or 6 months old. So she would be worthwhile getting on recording too, if you could censor the language as to what she had to tolerate.
In those days the roads of course were unpaved and that gives rise to all the stories one hears about the enormous amount of mud that existed in Oak Ridge and there weren’t any sidewalks either. One had to rely on the road itself or else the boardwalks, which were built down through the woods to places. And the transportation system, while it was free and was adequate under normal circumstances, no one considered themselves to be living under normal circumstances and that then made it inadequate. The other aspect of it was is that the first and foremost responsibility of the transportation system was to get people back and forth to work. As you know it’s a good many miles to X-10 from the Townsite area, and its quite some miles to Y-12 and it’s a good many more miles down to K-25. Also there were other work centers in those days and a goodly number of people were caught here without automobiles and with gas rationing and that sort of thing and many people who were my age and younger, were facing the prospect of military service. And some, as I had done, not too long before, had simply disposed of an automobile since the market was good for them and it appeared that we might be called for military service. So there weren’t too many automobiles. The transportation system gave rise to a problem, which in the people’s efforts to resolve that problem in turn gave rise to the formation of a town council. The proposal was made that individuals be charged for the transportation, and many people resented that very strongly and attacked the policy, which in effect had been issued as an order from the Manhattan District. Well that pointed up and gave focus to, a great many resentments that the large number of people coming in here had stored up about the manner in which they were ordered and shoved and in effect pushed around, often against what they’d been accustomed to, and totally out of keeping with what one might find in a normal community. And it was felt by some they were being treated essentially as though they were a private in a great big army and a good many of them they couldn’t remember being inducted in any army and so they were resentful of it. As the matter grew and attempts were made to collect for the transportation, a group of us at work felt that this kind of thing was going to be severely limiting in what we could do to get enough people to accomplish the work that there was to be done, and to even keep the people here who were already here and who were growing more and more disgruntled. There was simultaneously going on the process of army contracts being made with retail stores, which would provide the services. Those stores, one must say, took it as though they had a captive clientele and they, through their prices, were dreadfully exploiting people in their prices. Subsequently and after the war, a number of them were arrested and charged with, yes, I don’t know that anything much ever came of it because some of them were rather powerful men, but they actually had charges against them for price sealing evasions and that sort of thing. But that was a good many years later.
In hashing over these problems at work, we could see that if some basis on which people could live and be satisfied were not established, that the whole project, its goal, objective and the war effort and everything else would suffer rather dreadfully. So a fellow by the name of Hallstead and I called a meeting and invited a number of people, who we felt would share our concern about the matter. And so, when in my house on Georgia Avenue this group of people gathered. The upshot of the meeting was that we would call a Town Meeting at the high school, which was located near Jackson Square. We asked Blankenship who was superintendent of schools to serve with the group. Then we got the loan of an automobile with a loud speaker on it, and a number of us paraded it around over Oak Ridge announcing and calling the first Town Meeting of Oak Ridge. Well, to our amazement, the auditorium was filled and people crowded out along the outside of the high school. I had been designated as the individual to open the meeting and conduct it, thinking first that it was to be simply an opportunity for the people of Oak Ridge to voice their gripes and complaints and grievances. We’d ask some of the Army staff who were in command to come to the meeting for the purpose of listening and learning what was on the collective mind of people. As the meeting developed, some of the army representatives felt called upon to respond to various questions and statements and grievances that were raised, and as a result the thing threatened to break out into something resembling a little local war there. And the Army then, we understand, considered very carefully whether they would even allow such meetings, because of what apparently could have happened, but didn’t, at the first one. That news got back to us. We’ve never had any way of knowing whether it in fact was true or not but we felt that that made it really all the more important that such meetings be held, because we felt that it was very fundamental to the community that they have some recourse established to arbitrary or even capricious decisions that were being made that weighed heavily upon their every day life and the welfare of their families and children, having to do with the availability of food and clothing and shelter and transportation and medical care, the very basic needs on which an individual depends for his living, for his existence, for his enjoyment of life. We, then, decided the only thing to do was, very promptly, to call another meeting and once again an enormous crowd came out. So we put the proposition to the Town Meeting which we were deliberately calling it by that time and said to them that we felt that there should be an elected representative body, upon which the citizenry could rely for listening and hearing and understanding problems and then negotiating with the Manhattan District officers who were in charge, and/or the top management of the various companies that were here. And in those days, there must have been, maybe as many as 15 or 20 companies. We then asked that there be a motion on the floor, as to whether there should be such an elected group in Oak Ridge, and it was essentially unanimous that there would be. So we then announced the next meeting and appointed a group of people to work with drawing up what amounted to a charter, bylaws of this Town Council. At the following meeting, which we set a date, for once again a very large crowd showed up. We presented a very simple, I wish I had it, it would be a nice document to have but I don’t, it was a very simple thing stating what the purpose and the scope of activities of this elected Council would be, and how many, my recollection was 7, and ask for a motion of adoption which was almost unanimously passed and then we asked for nominations as to people who would serve on this. Well Hallstead was elected, Blankenship was elected, I was elected and Mrs. Matt Taylor was elected, a fellow by the name of Westfall was elected and there was another one or two whose names don’t come immediately to mind. Then we sat and scheduled regular Town Meetings, and as problems would arise, we would make the proper contact with the authorities and attempt to work out some resolution of the problem, which would accomplish the basic objectives of the Manhattan District. It would facilitate the accomplishment of the work by contractors and it would be to the extent possible, palatable or acceptable by the people. Well the Town Council remained in effect up until the time of the incorporation of the City of Oak Ridge, and no doubt served a very valuable and useful function in the City in that what amounted to a brand new community of almost spontaneous growth, didn’t fly apart, or fall apart in the very early stages of its growth. So I think most people involved would be willing to accept the view that it played a constructive and productive role in Oak Ridge.
In those days almost everyone, certainly the great majority of those who were in positions of responsibility and authority had been brought here from some place else. As a result, relatively few people were native in those categories, and at social meetings, and there were a great deal of them in those days, regardless of the hardships in getting around, there just weren’t any other lines of recreation. As a result people would simply get together and have card parties or a game party or dinners or social gatherings and that sort of thing. One generally met almost the same faces as one still does in Oak Ridge. You can go to 10 different meetings on 10 diverse subjects and if there are 50 people there, 30 of them will be in the same faces that you’ve seen at all 10. In those days one of the most common questions when you’ve spied a face that you didn’t know was to say - and where are you from? It was always taken for granted that no one was from here. So one evening at such a gathering at the guest house, now the Alexander, and one of these dowager types from Cambridge, Massachusetts came up to me and said, Mr. Elza, where are you from? I said, well ma’am I’m from right here. She said you mean you were born here? I said, Yes ma’am. And she said, and you grew up here? And I said, yes ma’am, right here. And she turned to her husband across the room and she says, oh dear come here. And she says, they’re training some of the natives to work on the project. And that’s how rare you see it was that it was a thing of surprise if you found someone that happened to be born and grew up right here. I remained here until about August or September, maybe October of 1944. This fellow Hallstead, about whom I spoke earlier, had left a couple of months before and gone back up to New York. He had gotten involved in a group that were planning the rehabilitation of the countries that had been at war. This group ultimately grew to become the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration. He telephoned me one day and said that he thought it was going to be a very exciting adventure and that if I were interested, to let him know. I had prospects in mind of the world opening up for me, and in a very short time called him and told him that I was interested and went up to see the people and was offered then the opportunity to go abroad and work with the military forces in planning the industrial health and civil restoration of nations as they were liberated. Had in the back of my mind if it were possible to get to China that’s where I wanted to go. Well as luck would have it, I did end up being assigned to China and the relationship of that assignment to Oak Ridge is, as I mentioned when we were closing the other day, that many people who were here, had in fact deduced what was going on here, without a doubt, they didn’t know how and they didn’t know who and they didn’t know where things were being done. But the basic objective of creating a weapon out of splitting the atom, there were a large number of people that realized that and understood it, although they never spoke to one another about it. There were enough bits and pieces around that if a person had in some basic knowledge, cared to try to put those pieces together, he could see where the arrow was pointing. As a result after I had gone overseas in late ’44, I had this expectation in my mind that the war very probably would last not very long and it couldn’t last long after this weapon was used. Due to a variety of reasons it developed that I was in the Chunking Central Hospital in China, had been ill two or three weeks, China’s a great place to get ill, if one seeks that sort of thing. So I was in the hospital the night when the first bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. At first of course I wasn’t aware of what had happened, but this great noise and excitement broke out all over the hospital, and I grabbed one of the nurses and I said, what on earth’s all the uproar and excitement about and she said to me, she says, a great new kind of bomb has been dropped on Japan and we think the war is over. Well I knew of course what had happened and the following morning I asked an acquaintance of mine who was on General -?Whitemire’s? – staff, if he could get a cablegram off to Lee Warren in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. He said, well sure he could manage that, he said what should it say? And I said, just simply say, Congratulations, the racetracks of Tennessee have spawned the winner, knowing of course that Warren would know what it was about and knowing also that maybe General Whitemire and some others would be kind of puzzled. So after I got back home someone had saved me a copy of the Y-12 newspaper in which that cablegram had been published and that terminated that period of my relationship to Oak Ridge until 1948 when I, yes?
Interviewer: Something we need to put in here, you told me the other day what the racetrack’s relation was to but we did not get it on tape. I would like to get that on the tape.
Mr. Elza: Well the electromagnetic process of separating Uranium 235 is the calutron process. Now when these things are set up, they’re set up inside a huge magnet. These magnets are laid out in the shape of a racetrack, they are an elliptical shape. Then all of the units that are operating to separate the Uranium 235 being of course the fissionable isotope of Uranium that you want, in order to get fission and get the weapon. Due to their shape, and there were a whole series of these things like racetracks and they are quite large, all of us that worked, referred to them as racetracks. And that then meant of course, and it turned out in fact that the material that lead to the bomb was in fact done I understand in Y-12 and that’s where it came from. So there had been some work that was somewhat successful. Of course they didn’t do the weapon there, that was done in Los Alamos, the mechanics of it and the plutonium that was used subsequently was done at Hanford. The K-25 plant made no immediate contribution to that aspect of the thing.
[side 2]
In 1948 I returned home from the Far East and had saved little money and I thought well when this whole mess started, I was in law school, so I’ll go back to law school. But, other things had happened too. I found that the $7 or 8 thousand that I had saved, really didn’t amount to much in 1948 as compared to 1940-1941, and it became clear to me in a very short while that that wasn’t going to get me too far. So, not having any additional children, but still having the same three, I felt that well I’m not going to make it all the way through so I’d better hunt a job. Around September when I was trying to make up my mind, do I register for school or do I hunt a job, I heard of a new organization being founded in Oak Ridge, and I came out to talk to some people I knew to try to find out a little bit about what kind of an organization is it, what are it’s objectives, who are the people involved and so forth. I learned that it was being called the Oak Ridge Institute of Nuclear Studies. It seemed to be a type of organization that accorded a great deal of my concepts of what I ought to do, not only to earn my living but a way to spend my time. And so I found out where they had an office and I went around and simply inquired whether or not there were any prospects of a job. Several people talked to me and they finally took me in to talk to a fellow named William G. Pollard. After about a 15 minutes talk with him, why he decided, I suppose, that yes there were opportunities for a job, and maybe I should start work right away since they were commencing to staff up for some programs. So that then led to my coming back to Oak Ridge in late October, early November of 1948 and I haven’t been away for any great length of time since then. Now, that is the Oak Ridge connection so far as I’m concerned. If you’re interested in other aspects of it, why then I’ll put myself at your mercy and see what else you might be interested in. I realize I haven’t covered all the topics but I’ve certainly outlined and sketched in my personal association. I don’t know that that’s of any great interest to anybody but in any event you now have it on tape.
Interviewer: I have found it very interesting. There were some other things that I was interested in and that is sort of the impact that Oak Ridge had on the surrounding area, or were you so enclosed within the gates that you didn’t have too much contact with….
Mr. Elza (continues): I suppose most people here had 98% of their existence inside the gates. Since I was native to the region, that was not the case with me because I had relatives and my school and everything else was outside the gates. As a result then, if I could remember it well enough, I ought to be in a somewhat better position. The first thing, I suppose, that was noticeable was a high degree of suspicion on the part of people living in the surrounding area who had already begun to develop second thoughts about TVA. They had by this time you see had 10-12 years of TVA and they had seen engineers and surveyors come into an area, roam around driving stakes and looking through spy glasses, as they called them, and then very shortly here came people insisting that they sell their land and move off of it. So there was this aura of suspicion and expectancy that seems to permeate the immediately surrounding area. Many people had the feeling and many people actually experienced individuals coming to them and saying we want your land, we want it now and we want you out of here, you see. That is not the better way of wanting friends and influencing people. Now, the second thing that I can recall and built into this background of suspicion and rather gloomy expectancy was the fact that relatively few people seemed to be getting jobs here.
Interviewer: You mean from the local area?
Mr. Elza (continues): From the local area, relatively few. They could see these hundreds and hundreds of people moving back and forth. They knew something was going on. They knew someone was paying but when they sought jobs, there were very few jobs for them.
Interviewer: That would be a source of quite a lot of resentment, I would think.
Mr. Elza (continues): It aroused more of this suspicion and doubt and then it became common for people outside the Oak Ridge area to be harshly critical of whatever went on. They seemed to play up in the newspapers if anyone from Oak Ridge was charged with theft or drunkenness or getting into a fight or something like that. The newspapers played it up and it enhanced Oak Ridge’s reputation in the surrounding area, you see, as being something just not quite right and not entirely welcomed. One doesn’t have to look too far or too deeply to find that some of that sentiment persists to this day. One other aspect of it was that those people who came seeking employment were always impressed with the demand for higher education. They were always impressed with the fact that they didn’t have it and that they couldn’t be considered until and unless they did have it. As a result then there seemed to be ingrained in the surrounding area, that it was a bunch of high brow crack pots that ran the place, and that gave rise to humor among the population, you see, and one needn’t look too far to find some residual elements of that kind of attitude on the part of people who were in the surrounding area. As a result there was a basic cleavage in the indigent, indigenous I should say, population as compared to those who had been brought in and concentrated in order to accomplish the work. But as time went on and the demands of construction became overwhelming, the demands of production became overwhelming, then it was learned that you could take people out of the surrounding area, the hills, the coalmines, the mountains, the farms, and you could bring them in and they had a very high native intelligence and they could be trained easily, quickly and well and they could be relied upon and depended upon actually to accomplish complex, difficult, highly skilled work. And now, I suppose, before the thing was over, maybe 30-40% of the total people employed actually came, not from the immediate vicinity, but from the general vicinity taking in Tennessee, Kentucky, North Carolina, Georgia, Alabama and so forth. So that tended to break down some of this and it began to establish contacts and so forth.
So that the people in Oak Ridge didn’t feel that it was a dangerous area outside that fence, and if they were to step out it they ran the risk of a deputy sheriff grabbing them, which literally did happen of course, you see. Because in those days the state of Tennessee had, what was known as the J P and fee grabbing system. That the sheriff and these deputies essentially lived off of fees made by arrest, you see. And the Justice of the Peace was referred to as the J P system and the J P system became known as judgment for the plaintiff, which meant of course that you were guilty as soon as you were charged, and you were fined and then you had to pay the court cost and those court cost were the fees. Now we had that system here, yeah, and there were people who got caught because there were, I am told, some sheriffs and so forth around here, that saw this great influx of population, and they knew they were employed, and they knew they didn’t care to fight minor cases and so it was a great source of fees, you see. But fortunately that sort of thing didn’t go on too much and it didn’t go on too long and it resolved itself.
The other thing was that with this enormous influx of population, I believe if I’m not mistaken, they had somewhere near 80,000 employed here at the very peak in a relatively small geographic area, so that there were shortages of anything and everything. Not only was it wartime but here was a concentration of one of the biggest activities going on, and in a small area, and in an area that was not heavily populated there to fore. Accordingly, everything was short. You never could find enough of anything. As a result the people outside tended to blame that on Oak Ridge. As the shortages increased, the prices rose, and so the people in Oak Ridge, not only were they victimized by the prices being charged, but they took the blame for the prices going up everywhere in the surrounding territory. That didn’t exactly endear the community to its neighbors around you see. The schools were all over crowded. The movie theatres were over crowded. The places to eat were over crowded and it was always them damned Oak Ridgers that were creating the clutter and the bother. Well, to some extent it was true, you see, and to some extent there was a reason that we weren’t beloved by our neighbors. So generally speaking those were the major factors. Now in the course of time, of course, this influx of large numbers of people with what at that time could be considered extraordinary levels of education, gradually impressed surrounding communities so that now the educational aspirations, the aspirations for healthcare, the aspirations for skilled employment, the family standards of conduct and behavior have been influenced both ways. I suppose Oak Ridge is not as high-hat as it once was. The surrounding area has recognized benefits that flow from association with Oak Ridge and that has gone, I’m satisfied, like waves on a pond, it has an extending influence as far away as you get. Now another thing, and its importance it seems to me, that one shouldn’t overlook is the essential nature of TVA to the location of Oak Ridge being where it is. Had it not been that this capability of generating enormous quantities of electrical energy existed here, it would so have changed the time scale of having concurrently to build this power capability, that it might well have been located elsewhere. But here you had TVA and you had the power generating capability and at one time I understand, we used more electricity in this area because of the plants, production plants then was used at that time by the City of New York. So if one hears that kind of thing, then one realizes how important TVA was to it. Now another aspect of the importance of TVA is that many of the experienced people who came here, came from TVA.
Interviewer: No one was aware of that.
Mr. Elza (continues): That’s right. There’s a rather large cadre of people who came here and they played their role, of course, in the general success of the thing. Some of them were extraordinarily able people like Lee Warren, for instance, but there were of course others. The most prominent one came in to effect in 1948 name David Lilienthal. He had not only played a very significant role in the location of Oak Ridge here, but in 1946 he was one of the group that played a leading role in the founding of Oak Ridge Institute of Nuclear Studies. So you could see how there was a network and a meshing of lives and influences throughout this thing. Had it not been for things of that sort it is doubtful if Oak Ridge would have been as successful as it was or that it would have flourished as it has, you see. So those are rather significant influences on Oak Ridge.
Interviewer: Do you feel that there was much resentment among the people who were actually displaced; the people who owned land in the area that was taken over, particularly so soon after Norris had taken over a lot of land?
Mr. Elza (continues): To call it ‘much’ of course presupposes some kind of a standard above this it’s much and below it it's not much. My personal impression is that in so far as Oak Ridge was concerned, it was not nearly the resentment that one found in the case of some of TVA’s places.
Interviewer: Well now I think that’s significant.
Mr. Elza (continues): I think it’s significant also but there again one needs to keep in mind that TVA had pioneered that sort of thing in this area. The sort of thing of demanding that people get the hell off their land and give it to something else that they don’t fully understand, but there are other factors in my opinion too. One of them is that we were at war, we were in rather desperate circumstances up until that time. Remember things hadn’t gone entirely well for us and people were in the mood of sacrifice. They were in the mood of being cooperative. You could stop a man on the street and tell him, persuasively, that you needed the coat off his back for the war effort and chances are at that moment he’d shuck his coat off and hand it to you and never look back. So that you had a wholly different set of circumstances.
Interviewer: And attitudes.
Mr. Elza (continues): And yeah, a willingness and simply by telling the people we need it for the war effort, you had a situation, which was more susceptible to acceptance in that, I felt, some of course resented it, particularly the elderly. The elderly who have lived all their life essentially in one place and they know and love every rock and tree and blade of grass, and then when they see bulldozers sweeping it into a pile of dust and burning it, it hurts, you see.
Interviewer: terrible experience…
Mr. Elza (continues): Yes and, for the elderly, it was primarily. I never heard any of the middle aged or younger generation protest much, but I did hear some of the elderly speak rather bitterly about it or perhaps nostalgically or longingly and wanting their place back. It was always the “homeplace” that they spoke of you see. Among people in East Tennessee the connotations of the term “homeplace” are rather profound. I know that personally, you see, which is one reason I never wanted to leave East Tennessee because I have that in my make up and my character. I love the mountains and the hills and the earth and the rivers and so forth. No place else is home and I can’t make it that way and don’t really want to. That’s something of the character of the people. Also there’s a fierce independence and the indominitable kind of characteristic. They don’t want to be shoved around and pushed against their will, and that didn’t sit too well with the Army way of doing things either, you see. And so there wasn’t exactly a setting for love.
Interviewer: I think perhaps these are some of the elements of the “town gown” conflict you see at the university towns too.
Mr. Elza (continues): Yes, I suppose. I don’t know enough about it really to disagree with that, but I have the feeling that the “gown” part of it has looked upon that alleged conflict of “town and gown” as being one other way that the “gown” can acquire for itself a little greater status, a little more prestige, a little more aura of beneficence because in arraying itself against the alleged “town” it is saying we have no time for the common places of this world, we have no time for commoners, we have no time for the lesser ilk of humanity. I don’t believe that that element which one might characterize as being a town plays any role in that so called “town gown” bit.
Interviewer: I think that’s very perceptive.
Mr. Elza (continues); I think the gown does it because the gown wants to be the gown, and wants everyone to know it’s the gown, and doesn’t like the idea of not being distinctive and so they array themselves in this adversary attitude and actually you won’t want it on your tape but I have to say it. It’s a crock of crap. Because frankly that’s what I think of it. I have, I suppose, some reason to call myself in either camp or both, but I recognize my fellow man as best I can for what he is. I do the best I can to recognize myself for that. And so I’m amused by it just as I am by a kitten playing with a ball of yarn and I’m amused by the antics of children, so the antics of adults is not unamusing including many of my own I assure you. But that’s a bit of fakery. It may not be elsewhere but the gown part of Oak Ridge has so aspired to be something like the University of Chicago or Harvard and so if you don’t have any basis for it, make one.
Interviewer: I agree.
Mr. Elza (continues): And this is part of their making one. That’s the way I see it. I don’t care whether I’m right or wrong, because I look upon the whole thing as being essentially meaningless and nonsubstantive. Well what other area do you have there?
Interviewer: Well I have covered most of the main areas but I do have a few other questions. Your children went to school in Oak Ridge all the way through school, is that right?
Mr. Elza (continues): Yes, except of course for the time we were gone, yes. All of them graduated from high school here and then my youngest brother was killed during the war. In accordance with the agreement among the brothers, why I took the children and reared them when their mother became ill and subsequently died. And so I had two other children who also grew up here and graduated. Then one of the girls went to Smith and one went to Holyoke and the boy went to George Washington, that’s Carl, my son, as well as the University of Tennessee. Jane, the other girl, not my daughter, graduated the University of Tennessee and Mike, my own son graduated University of Tennessee. So the whole flock went to school here and are now gone, only one child lives in Oak Ridge. As a matter of fact only one lives in Tennessee.
Interviewer: Did you feel that the Oak Ridge schools were different from the ordinary run of schools? Did you have any different feelings about those?
Mr. Elza (continues): Of course the implications of the ordinary run of schools is enough to get into the town gown bit again because Oak Ridge is guilty of that kind of thing, of thinking whatever is in Oak Ridge is exceptional, whatever outside is ordinary. Well that, to some extent, there may be a basis for that but it isn’t entirely true. Knoxville had extraordinarily fine schools and for the life of me, I couldn’t see any very significant difference in the quality of say the grammar schools in Knoxville and the grammar schools in Oak Ridge of that day. I could see reason to be prouder of the Oak Ridge schools because they have accomplished such an enormous amount in a very limited period of time, you see. But subsequently, I did feel that the Oak Ridge schools developed greater quality because they had much, much more money. When you compare what is spent on a child, lets say, in Woodland School to what is spent on a child in some small county school, particularly going back to 1943-‘47, the difference was great. Now, if you try to compare the quality of education per dollar spent, then you’ve got another standard on your hands and you begin doubting, are you truly getting that extraordinary value for the extraordinary amount of money. I’m inclined to think that Oak Ridge schools are among the best in the state and possibly even in the southeast. How much of that is a reflection of loyalty or pride in Oak Ridge, I don’t know, but that is the opinion I have.
Interviewer: Well that’s usually spoken of as one of the advantages of living in Oak Ridge. If you could mention what you thought of as advantages and disadvantages, over the years, I mean, not so much right now, but over the time that you have been here.
Mr. Elza (continues): It may have grown to be that, at the time of the formation of Oak Ridge in its early growth, I’m not sure it was so true. I am sure that those of us who were interested in attracting and retaining people here, we preached that doctrine because we wanted it to be true, and we knew that it was an important element in attracting and keeping people. Accordingly it may have been that we ultimately came to believe it ourselves. Or it could be that that kind of necessity, in fact, demanded extraordinarily good schools and did produce them. In the very early days, I simply don’t believe this was true. I think things were really too upset and too much turmoil, too many people were…….[break in tape] the last word on the other side got caught, but what I was saying is that the formation of the schools here had a man, A.H. Blankenship, who was as close an approach to an educator genius as I’ve ever known in a person of extraordinary energy and drive and enthusiasm. All the time I ever knew him I never saw him in any state of despair or disappointment. He had an optimistic fresh outlook on things and it required a person like that to generate a school system from nothing up to, I presume at that time, maybe caring for 10,000 kids. That’s one heck of a lot of people to put in school, at all levels of grades, and of course teachers weren’t the easiest people to come by. It was hard to attract them into a strange atmosphere, under strange circumstances, you see. That is the fundamental element in the quality of a school regardless of buildings and equipment and budget and so forth. The fundamental element is, and it took them a while to develop a cadre of extraordinary special students and I’m reasonably sure that the schools weren’t all that extraordinary in the early days.
Now you asked where else had I lived in Oak Ridge. The only other place is at 70 Outer Drive and that’s where Delaware comes into Outer Drive. I moved back in there, I believe it was 1950, best of my recollection because I came here in late ’48. It was still rather difficult to get housing and so I had to stand in line and wait. I believe in the spring of 1950 I moved there and have been there ever since. The kids essentially grew up there and went to school. That is the home and I might say my homeplace now. So what else?
Interviewer: Something which we sort of skipped over, we were talking about the advantages and disadvantages of living in Oak Ridge, do you feel that there are any disadvantages or were in the past?
Mr. Elza (continues): You’re speaking as of today?
Interviewer: Well I mean over the years really, once the war was over and ….
Mr. Elza (continues): Of course there’s very fundamental advantages as far as I’m concerned and that is that it located in East Tennessee.
Interviewer: Well I think that’s fundamental advantage too.
Mr. Elza (continues): And that’s home because, of course, you had the mountains and the lakes and you have tolerable climate that’s scarcely ever extreme either way, and that I think is an advantage to being in East Tennessee. That’s no particular advantage to being in Oak Ridge however because you could go across the river and have essentially the same advantages. The advantage in Oak Ridge today, which is most noticeable, is traffic and parking. You never had problems of parking like you do have, have in any other city I know, of the size and certainly not the same you have in larger cities. I can’t think of any extraordinary or very special advantage to be in Oak Ridge, based on Oak Ridge itself. I feel that there are some disadvantages. I think one doesn’t have ready and immediate access to the variety of market to take care of his needs that he would have in some other places. I think that he is in Oak Ridge in greater isolation than he would be in Knoxville, Nashville, Chattanooga and so forth. There are, in my opinion, inherent advantages in living in a smaller town as compared to metropolitan center, all having to do with less congestion, congestion of people, congestion of problems as well as traffic. I think Oak Ridge is an extraordinary town for its size in that it has the symphony, it has a ballet group, it has an Art Center, it has the theatre. It has, getting off into other fields, it has a rifle association and it has all kinds of sports and community organizations. Many, many larger much larger cities don’t have the variety of life, the variety of opportunity for association that Oak Ridge has, and it is small enough so that a person can grasp it, comprehend it, even embrace it if he wishes. It isn’t an elusive place. It isn’t as are some cities, a fearful place, a place of danger and threat. That makes it then, a place coupled with at least good schools and coupled with recreational opportunities in an extraordinarily fine place to live and have kids grow up. And it has been that ever since, I suppose, soon after the war was over. During the period of the war, however, it was in fact something quite different, you see, going up to 1949, I’d say. Then, there were unbelievable disadvantages to living here, but it was in such a framework of adventure and in such a framework of excitement, it had all kinds of ingredients of opportunity to work, work hard, work constructively. The feeling that one truly was accomplishing something, was a part of something big tended so much to compensate for the physical hardships, that they were of no consequence. It seemed to me that everyone accepted them, almost everyone. Those who didn’t, I believe were in a small minority but, Lord, just the process of getting garbage hauled, the process of dealing with coal furnaces. The process of getting coal, at times, was a struggle and the process of course with ration existed here and every place else. And transportation, hell, transportations is a problem in Oak Ridge today. If the family doesn’t have at least two automobiles or three or four, it is, it’s a grievous problem. The feeling of being a part of something that was momentous and historic can compensate for all kinds of problems and did. It was on that people tended to keep their sanity and keep their enthusiasm. What else do you have?
Interviewer: Well I think I’ve pretty well covered my questions and I certainly thank you for ……
[tape stops and restarts]
Mr. Elza (continues): You called to my memory the problem of shopping. This was a hardship that was mostly peculiar to the housewives and I realize in this day and age you aren’t suppose to use that term, but anyway in those days there were housewives. They would have to go and line up and sometimes 30 minutes to an hour or longer, in a line, at a meat counter, holding a number in their hand, and when their number was called then they would go up and would be told what meat there was. And if they had sufficient coupons then they could buy whatever it was, whether it was ground beef or sausage or what not. It was that way for almost all commodities that were under any kind of ration. What maybe now is a 15-minute stop at a store, could consume a whole half morning in trying to get what was necessary to keep the family together. Now men experienced that too because in the barber shop, which I believe at that time was about 12 chairs at Jackson Square, men would come in, say at 9 o’clock, and get a number for a haircut, go on about his business, maybe for an hour or two hours, and then come back and wait for his number to be called. Now if his number were called while he was gone, he had to turn in his number and get a new number and start over again, you see. And at that time men had their hair cut much more frequently than they do now. So with some and with almost everyone this was a biweekly ordeal. You had to dedicate either a Saturday morning or a Saturday afternoon to getting a haircut. Many of that kind of thing, you see, even if you had an automobile, why you had to have your ration coupons and then you would have to stand in line to get up to a gasoline pump where you could get gasoline. Those were actually hardships but they were hardships on a relative basis. They were hardships on the basis of what we now know and in those days, no one enjoyed it but you didn’t look upon it as being such a hardship, you see.
Transcribed: August 2005
Typed by LB